Flight 7 Heaven

Excitement guaranteed as Starship prepares to go operational

January 16 was a big day for SpaceX with the seventh flight of Starship, which ended in a blaze of glory. Stakes were high as they enter the final straight before Starship goes operational. This will open a new era of space colonization, because Starship is fully reusable, making it thousands of times cheaper to operate than conventional rockets. As you might expect for a colonization vehicle its lift capacity is huge: 100 tons for Starship version 2, rising to 200 tons for version 3.

First generation Starships, credit SpaceX

Steps Forward

Flight 7 was the first test flight of Starship version 2, which has many improvements e.g: -

• Body stretched by 1.8m to increase propellant capacity

• Smaller forward flaps were raised and shifted leeward to reduce heat stress during reentry

• Improved heatshield layout

• Separate fuel lines for Vacuum Raptor engines for redundancy

• Fitted with a Starlink satellite dispenser

• More powerful avionics system

The launch was picture perfect, with stage separation at 2 ¾ minutes, after which the Super Heavy booster returned and was caught by the launch tower. This was a big step because SpaceX plan to build one Starship every 24 hours and launch one colony spacecraft a day, if they can recover and reuse the booster.

Following stage separation Starship performed a 6 minute burn east towards Cuba. Unfortunately some propellant leaked from the fuel lines, which led to a fire, resulting in a ‘Rapid Unscheduled Assembly’ (RUD). For perspective: a new rocket has roughly 50% chance to fail on its first and second flights, so not unexpected. That said, some fallout is inevitable…

Starship RUD